


mermaid blue

by The_Eclectic_Bookworm



Series: nowhere else i'd rather be [8]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Comics 2019), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Gen, i am so sorry this is how i'm processing my emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:08:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25744846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Eclectic_Bookworm/pseuds/The_Eclectic_Bookworm
Summary: There was this one time—a sunny afternoon in September, or maybe it was early October, Buffy can’t remember now—where Jenny had done her nails.
Relationships: Jenny Calendar & Buffy Summers
Series: nowhere else i'd rather be [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1310792
Comments: 11
Kudos: 25





	mermaid blue

**Author's Note:**

> i'm writing this in the hopes that, like most of the other fics in this series, canon will eventually debunk it. this is pretty much my equivalent of standing on a chair and yelling "PROVE ME WRONG, CANON."
> 
> also, i love the concept of buffy and jenny's potential relationship, and even tho they haven't talked a whole bunch in ANY canon, this canon is one where buffy has literally no reason to dislike jenny at all. so i wanted to explore that a little.

There was this one time—a sunny afternoon in September, or maybe it was early October, Buffy can’t remember now—where Jenny had done her nails. It was a little while after the stuff with Xander, and Buffy still felt jumpy and twisty in a way that was hard to explain, but Jenny—Ms. Calendar, then—fixed her with a wryly amused look in the middle of training and said, sweetly, “Rupert? Skedaddle.”

Buffy, who had been about to start her drills with Giles, turned towards her Watcher with full expectations that Giles would very firmly put Ms. Calendar in her place. Giles, however, tilted his head a little and retreated to his office, brushing his fingers against Ms. Calendar’s cheek as he passed her chair.

“Are you _magic?”_ Buffy said incredulously.

Ms. Calendar smiled enigmatically. “You looked like you could use a break,” she said, which wasn’t really answering the question but definitely raised a few new ones. “Do you want to skip out on training and go hang with Willow or something?”

Buffy let out a frustrated huff of breath. “Couldn’t you have pulled that trick _yesterday?”_ she said miserably. “Willow’s out on a special date with Rose, and I’m pretty sure Xander’s hanging with Andrew and his crew or something. Today’s, like, that _one_ day where literally _no_ one is free to hang out with me.” Belatedly, she realized that she was _whining_ to _Giles’s girlfriend,_ and hastily backpedaled, “Not that I’m not grateful for what you did here! Really, I am! Even if I’m not _totally_ sure what it is that you just did, which I’m not—I mean, is Giles about to come back in with more drills? Does he know that you’re giving me the go-ahead to leave? What—”

Ms. Calendar’s easy smile was fading into a somewhat worried expression. “Buffy, are you okay?” she asked.

Buffy didn’t know _what_ it was about the way that Ms. Calendar said that to her, but something in her chest felt like it had very nearly snapped in two. Maybe it was the gentle concern in Ms. Calendar’s eyes, or the careful wariness to her words—whatever it was, it was _soothing_ in a way that not a lot of adults usually tried to direct in Buffy’s direction. Particularly not adults who knew what Buffy’s deal actually _was._

“I-I,” Buffy stammered, and sat down in the chair in front of Ms. Calendar without really thinking about it.

Ms. Calendar stretched her hand out across the table, wiggling her fingers. Buffy mimicked her, reaching out to take Ms. Calendar’s hand—but Ms. Calendar moved her hand back, rummaging instead in her purse. “Pink, red, or mermaid blue?” she asked.

“What?”

“Someone left some nail polish in my classroom,” said Ms. Calendar. “The policy is three days in the lost and found before it’s free game for everyone in the classroom.”

“Didn’t know that included _teachers,”_ said Buffy, amused.

“You know you sound like Rupert, right?”

“So what? Giles is cool sometimes!” Realizing what she’d just said, Buffy directed a furtive look towards the office. “He didn’t hear me, did he?”

Ms. Calendar let out a giggly breath through her nose, pressing her fingers to her mouth. It was such a weirdly non-adult moment that it kind of made Buffy smile too. “Do you _want_ me to do your nails?” Ms. Calendar asked. “If I completely screwed up my attempt at using the girlfriend card to buy you some free time, I feel like you should at least get _something_ out of it.”

“We should coordinate next time,” Buffy suggested. “I can just give you my schedule and you can pick a time to…I don’t know. Breeze into the library and distract my Watcher with your womanly wiles?”

Ms. Calendar shook her head. “It’s the element of surprise that made this whole thing work,” she said. “Rupert knows that you and I didn’t conspire against him to get you some free time, so he’s willing to acquiesce in this particular instance if I think you deserve a break.”

“Grown-up relationships are _weird,”_ said Buffy, which made Ms. Calendar giggle-snort again.

Ms. Calendar was kind of a dork. Not that this was any news to Buffy—Ms. Calendar had spent the second week of class trying to out-pun herself in every single speech she gave about coding, _and_ she’d laughed at all of her jokes in the same way Giles did when he made cross-referencing references. Buffy was genuinely pretty sure that Giles and Ms. Calendar were the most weirdly functional couple she’d _ever_ seen, and a lot of this hypothesis came from the fact that Giles and Ms. Calendar were both sweet and sincere and just _nice_ to her in a way adults usually _weren’t._ Giles had to be kind of a hardass sometimes because he was a Watcher, but Ms. Calendar—

 _“Do_ you want me to do your nails?” Ms. Calendar asked again. She looked a little nervous. “If you want to go, that’s okay too—”

“No, I—no!” Buffy stretched her hand a little farther out across the table, then thought better of it, getting up from her chair to take the one next to Ms. Calendar instead. “Can you do the blue ones? If it’s the mermaid blue from Hot Topic—”

“Wonder of wonders, I think it is,” said Ms. Calendar, fishing out the tiny bottle and setting it on the table. “Was it one you had your eye on?”

“My shift at Tunaverse is going towards a really cute skirt I saw last week at the mall,” said Buffy with a resigned sigh. “Responsible budgeting means I can’t afford to buy adorable glittery blue mermaid nail polish at Hot Topic, even if it’s _really_ adorable and _really_ glittery.”

“You know, if I was as levelheaded as you when I was a kid, I definitely wouldn’t have gotten into _half_ as much trouble as I did,” said Ms. Calendar idly, uncapping the nail polish bottle.

“Excuse _you,_ have you even _talked_ to Giles?” said Buffy skeptically. “I’m in trouble with him all the time!”

A shadow crossed Ms. Calendar’s face. (Buffy thinks about this shadow every day, now. She can’t shake it.) “I don’t know if that’s always entirely fair of him,” she said. “I know you have a lot to handle, Buffy, but you have to remember that even if you _are_ the one girl destined to save the world, that doesn’t mean you have to be ten times more magically mature than every teenager your age.”

“I’d give anything to be even _half_ as mature as some of the kids my age,” said Buffy, trying to smile. “It’s not like this gig is easy, but I can’t help but feel sometimes like another girl might be able to handle it better.” This felt like too much of an admission, but the polish had touched her thumb, and jerking her hand away would ruin the beginnings of Ms. Calendar’s careful, methodical work. She settled for letting her hand twitch—just a tiny bit—and focusing instead on the way Ms. Calendar’s choppy dark hair fell to hide her face. “I didn’t know you thought so highly of me,” she said.

Ms. Calendar let out a soft breath. “What I think is…a little complicated,” she said. “But. Yeah. I think you’re a pretty phenomenal kid, Buffy.”

“Yeah?” Buffy felt a strange, warm glow.

Raising her head, Ms. Calendar smiled—a smile that would stay with Buffy for years and years, long after she was _much_ older than Ms. Calendar would ever get to be. “You’re going to be a phenomenal adult,” she said. “I hope I’m around long enough to get to see absolutely _all_ of the cool stuff you do.”

“You know you’re probably gonna be around longer than _me,_ right?” said Buffy, trying to laugh.

“Sweetie, I’m twenty years older than you,” said Ms. Calendar pointedly.

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean.” Ms. Calendar finished Buffy’s index finger with an almost violent swipe. The manicure itself looked practically perfect, but a single drop of polish had marred the table, already half-dried and hardening. Looking up, she said very clearly, “You are going to be a _phenomenal_ adult. Okay?”

Buffy blinked, then smiled, feeling oddly shy in the face of Ms. Calendar’s appreciative scrutiny. “Okay, Ms. Calendar,” she said, doing her best not to blush.

Ms. Calendar grinned, clearly pleased with—herself, or Buffy, or maybe both of them. “You can call me Jenny when we’re not on the clock, you know,” she said. “I let Willow do it sometimes. Just…” She trailed off, leaning in conspiratorially. _“Don’t_ tell Rupert, okay? I think he’ll have life-ending conniptions about _professionalism_ and then I’ll be out a really quality boyfriend.”

Buffy couldn’t hold back her laughter at that.

* * *

Buffy ended up calling Ms. Calendar _Jenny_ for the rest of Ms. Calendar’s life. She didn’t do it in class—rather, she tacitly avoided using Jenny’s name, choosing instead to quietly and patiently raise her hand until Jenny noticed her waiting for teacherly support. Outside of class, it was _hey Jenny, can you do my nails again,_ or _hey Jenny, can you tell Giles he should let us order pizza for our study night in,_ or _hey Jenny, that outfit is actually kinda stylish for a teacher—_ and that last one made Jenny laugh so hard she spilled her coffee on the memo she was reading. She had to borrow Giles’s copy to read it instead.

The rest of Ms. Calendar’s life, as it happened, was two more months.

* * *

“So,” says Buffy, and sits down on the cool grass, tucking her knees in as she settles herself against the headstone. “Hi, Jenny.”

Giles isn’t here. Buffy can’t help but kind of be mad at him for that one. He keeps on saying that he’s going to visit the grave, and then _not_ visiting the grave, and then spending like three days locked in his office not talking to anybody. Which, fair, it’s a _lot_ for all of them to deal with—but sometimes Buffy kinda thinks that he chooses to remember the parts of Jenny that were pretty and funny and dorky and sweet, and not the parts of Jenny that were really fucking mad at him even before she knew how to articulate it.

She found Jenny’s frustrated journal entries, lots of scrawled pages about how much Giles was fucking over girls who deserved a life outside their calling. She feels kind of like maybe it should be Jenny as a Watcher, painting Buffy’s nails and encouraging her to be better and braver and stronger than the thousands of girls who lay down their lives for the sake of the world. Maybe it would be easier to believe that other people could be a part of her life if people like Jenny didn’t end up dead.

“Xander’s…” Buffy trails off. She doesn’t know how to even _begin_ to talk about that one. “He’s not gonna be a problem for anybody anymore. Least of all _you,_ I guess.” She manages a weak giggle. “I bet you’d have laughed at that one, right?”

Jenny _was_ pretty and funny and dorky and sweet. Jenny was Buffy’s favorite teacher. Giles was—and is—Buffy’s favorite _Watcher,_ but Jenny was Buffy’s favorite _teacher._ There is a distinct and subtle difference that Buffy _really_ doesn’t want to think about too hard.

“Giles misses you,” says Buffy. And then, because it matters a hell of a lot more to her, _“I_ miss you.” She sniffles. “I wish you were here. You’re kind of really good at painting nails, and there was that one time you said my outfit looked really cute, and even _Rose_ cried at your funeral. I don’t even think she took your _class._ You were just…you were so _nice_ to everyone. I don’t even know how you did that.”

Jenny is quiet. Dead people usually are.

“I don’t think nice people last super long in Sunnydale,” says Buffy. “What Xander gave up for Willow…that was the bravest, kindest thing I’ve ever seen somebody do. And then…” She trails off again. “I don’t know. I feel like this town just systematically kills off good people. Or maybe it’s just all about killing off the best parts of people. I don’t _know.”_ Her voice breaks. She lets her head fall against the headstone and wishes, wishes, _wishes_ that Jenny was here right now. Giles was the one who made all the plans, but Jenny was the one who talked him into letting Buffy and Willow stay home from school to stay with Xander.

“You were so fucking _cool,”_ Buffy whispers. It’s taking everything in her not to start crying. She feels like she’s done enough crying to last a lifetime—that, and if she starts crying now, she might spend the rest of her life crying. The grief she carries around with her is impossible to bear alone. “I wanted to _know_ you.”

Jenny had said that Buffy didn’t _have_ to be alone—not explicitly, not in as many words, but she’d _said_ it. Jenny had said that it wasn’t Buffy’s job to fight alone, _die_ alone—but Jenny was dead. _Is_ dead. Is never going to be alive again, and wouldn’t have died if Buffy had been just _that much better_ at the job she was supposed to be doing.

“I’m _going_ to do better.” Buffy presses her fingers against the letters of Jenny’s name, trying to call back the warmth of Jenny’s smile. It eludes her. All she can remember is the cold, cold emptiness of Giles’s eyes when they found what was left of kind, sunny Jenny Calendar. “I-I’m _sorry._ I won’t be who you thought I could be, but—but no one is ever going to die the way you did again. I promise.”

The mermaid blue nail polish is tucked in her pocket for this moment exactly. Buffy sets it against the headstone, balancing it carefully on the little ledge. She doesn’t know how to say goodbye—doesn’t know if she _ever_ will—so she gets up, slowly, tears stinging her eyes and blurring her vision enough that it’s genuinely hard to make out the world ahead of her. Hugging her elbows to her chest, she leaves the cemetery on her own.

Kendra falls into step with her when Buffy reaches the street. “Buffy,” she says, but Buffy shrugs her off, walking faster and faster until it’s just her, alone.

* * *

The road is empty and quiet, and Buffy Summers is the only girl in all the world who can stop the demons from overtaking it.


End file.
